Furry postmortem and tech paper and timelapse
December 21st, 2010 4:40 pmOk, so few thoughts after the LD:
What did I plan to do:
I wanted to do a small demoscene like game with networking support
What did I do:
I did completely different. I made a 3D FPP game. I made it about furballs, I’m not sure why, maybe because that was easy. Also, I guess the furry thingies look rather well 
What went well:
I managed to create engine that can display voxely 3D graphics using OpenGL lines and points that uses 2D bitmaps.
What went wrong:
Due to extensive engine programming, my level design is pretty RAD. But I hope eye-candy can make up for it.
Technology whitepaper:
Ok, so my engine uses 2D bitmaps to generate 3D voxels. It uses 3 functions for it, that can take 1,2, or 3 images. It adds some randomness to the voxels, and can multiply their number (e.g. 2 voxels per pixel). The other part of the engine, creates land out of two bitmaps, grass colour map and grass heightmap. It then generate grass blades with corresponding colour / height according to a map. There is also a third map, which contains positions of entities. Single pixels along it describe placement of different objects on game level ground. Furballs, however, are generated programatically. Oh, there’s also the ground quad. The ground quad is drawn on the fly sing grass colour map, and applies a checkerboard effect to it. It is done so that ground colour can dynamically change, as opposed to grass colour. The following images illostrate this all:
Overall, I’m satisfied with what I managed to do, and I hope you will have fun playing it.
There should be a time-lapse here too, but it’s still uploading. I’ll post it in 30 minutes or so.
PS: added timelapse:
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
DO NOT WATCH UNTIL YOU PLAYED THE GAME!!!!
Timelapse
timelapse looks very nice, but is there any link to a game itself?
Oh sorry I forgot to add it http://so0os.com/misc/furballs.zip
it’s very, very nice engine you did. it’s creates nice funky mood with some 8bit lo-fi atmosphere. just love it.
but it’s not a game, it’s actually nothing to play with or about. please, use this engine for next LD and make great game!
and some suggest: maybe as you know distance to grass it’s shouldn’t be expensive to set thickness correspond to it?
@gamnot: have you tried clicking the mouse???
And thanks, I’m glad you like it 
About grass, It’s rendered in one batch, to gain some speed, actually I should have divided it into zones, but I lacked the time to do it.
Pretty amazing, especially considering the time spent.
It’s stuff like this that makes me miss the tech category when voting.